Anal sex is everywhere in porn and now it’s taking the romance genre by assault. If you have an erotic romance story, you bet the hero at one point will ask the heroine for anal sex—that is, if he doesn’t force her into it. It’s usually a male’s decision that the girl accepts in the name of love and lust. The hero guarantees she’s going to like it. Countless heroes have done so: let’s train your ass, you’ll love it, yada-yada-yada—then a kiss on her forehead and a dick shoved up her butt.

Wait a minute.

How can he be so sure she’ll love it? And how can he make that decision for her?

It’s not his body.

Anal sex is a male fantasy. It gives the man a sense of empowerment over the woman: he reigns in a dominant position, which is heightened by the idea of transgression: he is entering a forbidden territory. As for women, they have been trained by male porn to find it a desirable practice, since porn is the major sex reference in our society. Anal sex seems to be turning mandatory in erotic romance as it already is in male porn. That really bugs me.

Anal sex is not mandatory: it’s optional.

We are all being brainwashed to believe that everyone should do it, that this is what we want and enjoy. The mass media convinces us through endless repetition that we need this phone, we need those jeans, and now we need anal sex. That’s the anal dictatorship in which we live nowadays.

If you remember from an earlier post, the staple anal sex in porn stemmed out of men’s resentment against women. I would say that’s definitely not the best approach to sexuality. Let’s recall pornographer Paul Hesky’s pearls of wisdom: “Essentially, it comes from every man who’s unhappily married, and he looks at his wife who just nagged at him about this or that or whatnot, and he says, ‘I’d like to fuck you in the ass.’ He’s angry at her, right? And he can’t, so he would rather watch some girl taking it up the ass and fantasize … and that is the attraction, because when people watch anal, nobody wants to watch a girl enjoying anal.”

Now this is what male sex educator Michael Castleman has to say about anal sex: “In porn, ‘anal’ usually means penis-anus intercourse. In real life, this is the least popular form of anal play. Most real anal play involves gentle sphincter massage or shallow fingering. Women who do anal scenes use gobs of lubricant and wear butt plugs for an hour before going on-camera, but viewers never see this. Worse, some porn includes penises that go directly from the woman’s anus into her mouth, which may transmit infection.” Castleman wrote that in an article back in 2012. Today, anal sex has become more common in the real world, thanks to the indoctrination pushed by mainstream porn and now by mainstream erotic romance novels.

The vagina is designed for penetration. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should do extreme stretching or pounding because tears will certainly occur. Nor should you have unprotected vaginal sex, as the risks of getting AIDS and other STDs still exist.

Here is the anus:

— A very fragile ONE-cell thick lining, hardly any protection

— No elasticity

— No natural lubrication

— Higher pH

— Tissue prone to microtears that make it vulnerable to infections and STDs

— Abundant M cells that capture and deliver viruses into the body system

— At least 31% higher risk of HIV and other STDs, in a conservative view

In addition, keep in mind that the use of condoms DOES NOT offer 100% protection against STDs. In an interview, a former prostitute turned sex advisor in Brazil told she used to have anal sex with her clients only once every three days precisely because she was aware of the risks and wanted to protect her body—she was a divorcee in the sex business to support her daughter.

Besides posing much higher risks when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases, anal sex can cause hemorrhoids if not done properly. In extreme cases such as the violent pounding and even double anal penetration endured by pornstars, rectal prolapse may occur: the anus falls out of the body and needs to be stitched back through surgery.

No one mentions those things in porn videos and erotic novels.

That being said, yes, anal sex can be satisfying if done the right way, with lots of foreplay and lube, and avoiding unnecessary risks. The anus has many nerve endings that can enhance pleasure. Anal sex thus may be great or interesting or uncomfortable or very painfully. That will depend on the woman, her mental state and anatomy, as every woman is different. For a man it’s quite easy: it’s his fantasy and his butt is not on the line.

My two cents

That doesn’t mean a fantasy of male domination is necessarily unhealthy. In fact, it can be a turn on for both male and female when performed with complicity and respect (respect, by the way, doesn’t need to be vanilla). In such scenario, like anything else, it can deepen a couple’s intimacy and emotional connection. Anal sex usually has the woman on all fours and the man behind her. It’s animalistic—that’s how animals mate—and for that reason can be very hot. You want the excitement without the pain in the butt? That is achieved by simply adopting the doggie-style position while using the front entrance. Anal or not, the doggie position can make the male parts rub on the right female parts as well as deliver that wild edge.

But let’s go back to our primary anal subject.

As I mentioned on my post about romance heroines, anal sex and any other sexual experiments should be discussed and performed with spontaneous and mutual consent. If one of the partners suggests an idea, a conversation should follow, no matter how brief. That’s when both partners agree to do whatever is being suggested. If one of them feels uneasy and is not in agreement, then that practice can’t happen. It’s as simple as that. And there’s more: consent can be withdrawn anytime if discomfort arises. “Yes” is not set in stone.

What I constantly find in porn film is men sodomizing women without consulting them. It’s a given that those objectified women are there solely to please men: they don’t have wishes, preferences or opinions. Then there’s always the director shouting orders for them to moan how much they’re enjoying it. In romance, it’s not very different. The hero decides what he wants to do with her butt, she goes along with it despite being reluctant and then she ends up loving it. I’m not sure if that’s even realistic.

Furthermore, the staple position for anal sex tends to be the woman on her knees or piled up over the man while he pounds into her. Both positions, in porn, are aimed at displaying the penetration and the woman’s genitalia for the camera. And, in both cases, the woman has little control over the man’s movements. In order for that to happen, the man should lay on his back and the woman should kneel astride him so to be able to rise and lower her hips, controlling the penetration in a way that’s comfortable for her.

Those were my two cents of advice on this subject. I won’t be giving anal sex tips because there are plenty of articles about it out there, should anyone decide to try it.

Take care of yourself, respect your own wishes and be happy. Ignore what popular culture tells you. Popular culture is an interpretation of reality: it’s not reality per se.

On my next post I’ll be talking about sex education in schools. Interestingly enough, we’ll have another brush with anal sex. Yep, it’s all over the place. Stay tuned!

To wrap up my previous post about the ways male porn sneaks into mainstream erotic romance and shapes female desire, I’ll quickly mention a few more books as examples.

In Bare to You by Sylvia Day, we have the hero trying to persuade the heroine she’s a submissive even though she’s telling him otherwise; and even though he’s a refined billionaire, he keeps referring to her vagina as cunt.

In Bang by E.K. Blair (which I loved for other reasons), the infuriated hero beats up the heroine with a belt; later he urinates inside her to “mark” her as his. In Echo, the sequel, he’s enraged and brutally rapes her in the ass even after having learned that she was sexually abused during her entire childhood. She’s also raped by another character with the handle of a gun.

In Echo: A Dark Billionaire Romance by A. Zavarelli, the blurb reads: “He says he owns me. And it’s true … I’ve signed over complete control of my body and life for six months to a man I don’t know … He likes to hurt me. I love to let him. He brings me to life. He sets me free.”

In Owned by M. Never, the hero says, “I like you collared, baby. I like you naked, I like you mine.” He drugs her, and she wakes up in a cage to be raped every day until her will is broken, for her own safety because he’s “protecting her” from a terrible danger.

I also remember reading the synopsis of a novel where the dominant hero for some reason could only experience pleasure through anal sex, so the girl went along with that. I didn’t read the novel, but I can imagine all the lust and backdoor activities happening on a regular basis.

Do we see a pattern here? Keywords: submission, property, rape and, of course, anal sex all over the place. Some of the details in the books I’ve mentioned are so out there I won’t even comment on them, as I don’t mean to be harsh. My only goal here is to detect elements in those stories that connect to porn. And keep in mind that there are gazillions of similar novels in the mainstream market.

The problem is also that, just like porn, many erotic novels portray actual-life role playing—in which no actual harm is done—as the real thing. So they glorify sexual violence I remember watching the 2014 documentary Kink about the homonymous BDSM porn site kink.com. The pain is real, but they’re all very professional and respect the performers’ boundaries. There are two things, though. One, performers feel they have to endure as much pain as possible. Two, there are rape scenes in some of the films. The usual yada-yada, the rape occurs and in the end the victim enjoys it (I am so sick of repeating this over and over, it’s past getting old).

When you see the shooting, it’s clear no harm is done. But when you watch the scene, even though you know it’s a performance, it sells you the idea of the real thing: that rape is normalized as something acceptable because it’s exciting and the victim likes it. It also reinforces the notion that when a woman says no, she actually means yes because she will eventually enjoy forceful sex. So those films are not selling a fantasy, they’re selling an idea. The same goes with erotic novels. And that can be very dangerous.

Even novels without blatant violence such as Burning Offer by Audrey Parker reveal a strong porn influence. Here the heroine literally drenches her panties just by looking at the hero. A couple of characters have sex on cue and the guy penetrates her in a rough way (apparently, it’s the only way to penetrate a woman these days). A girl screams she wants the guy to come all over her face. The hero ejaculates on the heroine’s back over her dress, and later he threatens to stick his cock down her throat and fuck it until she learns to listen.

To fuck a woman’s mouth. How sweet. As I remember, fellatio used to be a way for a woman to express herself and actively pleasure a man all the while having pleasure in the process of giving. Now, thanks to porn, it has been reduced to “mouth fuck,” meaning the woman is again a passive hole and gets nothing out of it except for a sore throat and a very unpleasant chocking session. What was once a sensual expression bonding a woman and a man turned into punishment creating distance. That’s how fucked up porn is. That’s how it fucks up our sexuality.

Have we become so colonized by male porn that romance authors are compelled to write that kind of stuff and readers are compelled to love it? Just like male porn molded men’s sexuality, it seems erotic romance finished the job by molding women’s sexuality. Research shows that, unlike men, women don’t enjoy extreme porn. But now extreme porn comes to women in the form of books sugarcoated in romance, and it desensitizes them just as filmed porn has desensitized men.

I highly doubt women would enjoy watching a film with a heroine being painfully raped in the ass, but in writing there’s a whole backdrop to that scene, the hero is hot and has a thing going with the heroine, and he will inevitably root for her at some point, so rape becomes acceptable and readers forgive it—some simply brush it off and forget about it in face of the happy ending. While the violence becomes ingrained in men’s brains through sexual gratification, in romance books it becomes ingrained in women’s brains through a romantic backdrop. In both cases, violence gets inextricably linked to sexual pleasure and titillation.

When you sexualize violence, it becomes invisible.

My personal experience

Even review submission forms in romance blogs sometimes state that the staff won’t accept books with rape perpetrated by the hero but “forceful seduction” is okay. What the hell does that even mean? Forceful is forceful and is NOT okay. It implies that a man is entitled to a woman’s body no matter what. I have a confession to make, though. After reading books of that kind, I myself fell into the trap once. I’ll share my personal experience to illustrate how easy it is for that to happen.

After reading those books, I questioned for a moment if my novel RED wasn’t too tame. Although graphic, it didn’t include anal sex, and the BDSM in it was light and not too detailed, focusing rather on pleasurable foreplay and emotional connection. Now I’m actually happy it stayed that way.

When I wrote a Fifty Shades of Grey spin-off for a contest, however, I knew it would have to be very steamy, so I created a scene where the attraction between the main characters had the hero immobilizing the heroine and fingering her while she protested: he aimed to prove that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. I was aware the scene was over-the-top but it felt tongue-and-cheek to me, since there was humor in it. The copy editor, a middle-age man who obviously has never read erotic romance, pointed out that that was rape. I dismissed his comment, as readers raved about the story and I had no time to rewrite that whole scene. I opted for the easy solution of stressing how much the heroine was attracted to the hero, conveying she was sending mixed signals to him—which is a dangerous notion nonetheless, as interpreting signals is subjective, in which case any man could force himself upon a woman with the excuse that she had sent him mixed signals.

If I were to write that story today, I would do the scene differently.

Before reading contemporary erotic romance, the inclusion of rape in one of my plots would have never crossed my mind. But on another occasion, I caught myself considering a rape scene—or “forceful seduction” if you will—for a short story. It would be a disguised role play session, so the hero wouldn’t be actually forcing the heroine to have sex, although the unaware reader would have that impression. It seemed to me like a way of adding tension and excitement to the plot. It’s a common gimmick: include rape in a story, and you’ll immediately create conflict, interest and empathy. Then all alarms went off in my head. Why on earth would I resort to a rape scene to promote sexual titillation through a non-consensual act, even if it wasn’t real rape?

There you go. In spite of all my preaching against that sort of message, I almost fell into the trap. Authors, like everyone else, are not immune to cultural indoctrination.

On my next post I’ll talk about something that is becoming the norm in mainstream erotic romance, just as it is mandatory in mainstream porn: anal sex. I read somewhere that it has turned into the “new virginity” in erotic romance. Let’s take a closer look at that butt, shall we? I will not be discussing romance further: on my next post I’m going strictly anal—for your reading pleasure.

My very first post on this blog was about heroines in romance novels. I felt compelled to write it after reading a number of erotic romance novels and detecting a pattern of heroines being sexually abused by their heroes. I began to wonder why and, among other reasons, concluded the authors—all of them women—had been colonized by male porn to such an extent that they were reproducing it in their stories. Readers, colonized as much as the authors, bought the idea and created the necessary demand to make that sort of material thrive in mainstream erotic romance.

At the time, I was surprised but hadn’t really paid close attention to porn. Now that I have, I can understand the reason why male porn is so pervasive in romance novels written by women for women: it is the major reference for sex available, and it has already expanded to pop culture as I’ve mentioned in another post. Here I will analyze some of the stories I came across.

Fifty shades of female frustration

I will start with Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, the erotic novel whose success inserted male porn in mainstream romance and opened the gates to a deluge of similar stories. It’s all about female submission, exquisite pleasure mixed with pain and the notion that a woman is a man’s property. Female readers found the novel to be empowering and liberating for women. I’m not so sure about that. Fifty Shades more likely provided women with an outlet to their sexual fantasies and a titillation of transgression, since BDSM deviates from regular sexual practices—when the novel first came out in 2012, BDSM wasn’t prevalent in pop culture as it is today. In that sense, the novel validated women as sexual beings entitled to have pleasure and break free from the boundaries of convention. Finally, women had found their own porn in the mainstream.

If you strip off Fifty Shades of its sexual content, however, what’s left is a very traditional love story, with conventional male and female roles of dominance and submission. But the novel didn’t stay at that: when it reinstated the notion that a woman is the property of a man, it actually took women’s rights and freedom backwards, making us go back a few hundred years. In old times, women were indeed the property of men, with their sexuality tightly controlled to protect property and make sure they didn’t generate illegitimate heirs.

Moreover, I don’t see how a heroine could be possibly empowered when she’s afraid of the hero, begs him not to hurt her, and is subjected to sex as punishment for his pleasure. Christian Grey, nevertheless, is rich, handsome and emotionally damaged, so all is forgiven. Ana can’t resist him, and in spite of her reluctance, she always experiences glorious orgasms no matter what he does—here, we have the typical male porn scenario, when the man imposes acts the woman doesn’t want and doesn’t like, but eventually enjoys.

Something else is going on with Fifty Shades. In his own words, Christian Grey is a sadist. Why would any woman in her right mind find it so hot to be around a sadist? Yet readers rave about the novel. As I mentioned, Grey is very handsome. I doubt women would be so excited to submit to his whip if he looked like an ogre. And what’s with the contract he wants Ana to sign in order to become his property? That doesn’t make any sense. Imagine a lawyer in real life writing such contract. Wait: a lawyer wouldn’t write a single line because that’s slavery and, according to the Constitution, it’s illegal.

So that begs the question: why, oh women, why are you so drawn to Christian Grey and the damn contract? I have a guess. Maybe women are tired of decades of double shift, working hard to make a living and then going back home to take care of endless household chores. In that light, the thought of having someone free them of that burden is appealing. Let alone someone handsome and filthy rich like Christian Grey.

There’s an archetypal dynamics in romance novels with alpha males that goes like this: the abusive hero resists his budding love for the heroine and mistreats her as she endures it and quietly gets under his skin. Maybe that goes to teach female submission or the lesson that love conquers all? There’s also the irresistible appeal of a damaged hero that makes his bad behavior forgivable: it speaks to the feminine nurturing nature while tickling it with the challenge of winning the hero’s heart.

I see countless women over the Internet that are addicted to romance books. They say they need them to escape the chores and worries of their daily lives. Have women become so worn out by double shifting that they desperately need this outlet? Or are some of them still eternal princesses in search of a prince?

Strange temptation

The next book I’m going to peruse is Sweet Temptation by best-selling author Maya Banks. Here, the heroine Angelina is offered by the hero Micah to his pals Rick, Chris and Cole. He doesn’t ask her permission or warns her about what’s going to happen since he can do whatever he wants because “she belongs to him.” The scene goes on for several chapters. It starts with Angelina bare naked, with a butt plug stuck up her ass, bringing beer to the men at Micah’s command. I describe what happens next in the section below. The passages in italics reflect the same kind of wording used in the book. I warn you that the scene is quite graphic. If you like, you can skip the details—just ignore the section below marked with stars.

* * * Warning: graphic content * * *

Angelina sucks Rick without being allowed to use her hands. He yanks her down, forcing her into his erection. After a while he says, “Holy shit, she’s magnificent.” Then he pulls away, forces her mouth open, jerks off and ejaculates in her mouth. He commands her to hold it all. He commands her to swallow it. Then he calls her a sweetheart. Chris is next and has vaginal intercourse with Angelina. He’s huge and stretches her impossibly to the point of pain and it’s delicious. At one point he says: “You can’t take all of me, baby? Not many women can. Before the night’s over with, you will. You’ll take me in every one of your holes.”

He ravages her nipples, she whimpers in pain but wants more. He hammers all of his dick into her as she cries out in pain. She orgasms. He says it was amazing and is careful not to hurt her when he withdraws. After a brief break for rest, Cole kisses Angelina, moving his hips forcefully over hers. Micah (the hero) stares at her with approval and desire. Cole orders Angelina to kneel down and ties her wrists up to some sort of BDSM apparatus. He says, “I’m going to mark you, Angelina. Not just a red welt here and there.”

He adds she can stop him but he doesn’t think she will. Then he starts whipping her. Micah presses his cock to her mouth. He’s deep in her throat in a second. She makes a choking sound and he grips her tighter. Rick says “that’s fucking hot.” It’s Chris turn to fuck her mouth brutally. She chokes and coughs, he fucks harder until he orgasms. The front of Angelina’s body is covered in his and Micah’s semen, “rivulets over her skin, warm, soft, evidence of their passion.” Rick rounds up the “passion” by ejaculating over her breasts. Cole stops whipping her at this point and proceeds to spank her with a wooden beam. It hurtslike fire but soon Angelina is taken by sweet pleasure. The blows continue to land hard. Cole kisses her abused flesh.

Angelina is released and then tied up by two ropes hanging from the ceiling. She’s balancing on tiptoe. Cole takes her in the ass while tenderly stimulating her in the front—a demonstration of his caring and regard for her. She orgasms. Micah releases her and kisses her gently.

Angelina kneels down, Chris penetrates her ass while Rick penetrates her mouth. Chris praises her obedience to owner Micah and says she’s wonderful, Rick says “Suck my dick. He’s going to fuck your ass until you make me come.” He forces himself deep into her throat. Chris hammers into her, knocking her forward. She would have screamed as pain lances through her throbbing anus, but Rick’s cock is buried so deep she can’t even breathe around it. Chris says he has some bad news for Angelina: he’s only halfway in. He hammers forward again, she rips her mouth from Rick’s cock and Rick grabs her hair, yankingher head back down and forcing his cock back into her mouth.

The thing goes on, she wants more, she feels “beautiful” and “alive.” I thought they were already going at her as hard as it gets, but apparently not, because they go even harder. Chris touches her clitoris and she orgasms, bursting “like an overinflated balloon.” Rick brings her a drink and apologizes for coming in her mouth, saying it was “kind of uncool.”

Angelina is sprawled and tied up on a table. Cole kisses her, and she thinks he tastes of “comfort” and “love.” He explains he will use safe candles on her and proceeds to drip hot wax all over her body. Micah caresses her between her legs, Rick and Chris suck her nipples. It goes on, and this is how she feels: With four sets of male eyes admiring her naked, wax-splattered body, she felt beautiful, desirable. Ultra feminine and powerful. “And now we’ll all have you, Angel girl,” Micah says. Coles fucks her hard in the vagina, then is replaced by Rick and finally by Chris. Then Cole takes her ass while Micah takes her vagina, in double penetration, and Rick and Chris make her suck them. Afterwards, still in double penetration mode, she gives both Rick and Chris simultaneous hand jobs until they ejaculate on her. Cole ejaculates in her. Finally, Micah’s friends thank Angelina for a wonderful evening, pet her gently and say she’s amazing.

After his friends leave, Micah prepares a bath for Angelina. When they go to bed, “he hovers protectively over her, a shield between her and the rest of the world,” and takes her slowly. They reach orgasm. She falls asleep, “surrendered to the velvet clasp of his protection.”

* * * End of graphic content * * *

There’s more stuff happening with Cole and apparatuses and whatnot in the next chapters, but I think you get the gist. I apologize for the graphic details, but I included them to illustrate the violence and how it is delivered to look acceptable and desirable. This is always done in romance novels that feature an abusive hero. He hurts, he kisses, he mistreats, he brings flowers.

I don’t even know how to begin with Sweet Temptation. It’s pure porn. Just film it and you’ll have the perfect gonzo video. The only thing is, no real woman would survive that. Just like in a staple gang bang scene, Angelina is reduced to a body for abuse and a set of holes for ad nauseum penetration. We have in one single evening fifteen penetrations, one of them double vaginal-anal, and on top of that whipping (blood drawn), spanking with a wooden beam, hot wax play, lots of ordering the heroine around, hair gripping, gagging, forcing and hammering, as well as the classic money shot featured in every porn film on earth. In addition, there’s the message that, if a woman is beautiful and behaves like a good object, she’s praised and desired, which means she’s loved—is she?

Since this is a romance novel and not a porn film, instead of spitting on her face, the men make compliments to Angelina and have bouts of “tenderness” in between forceful acts. Here’s an example from my description: He hammers all of his dick into her as she cries out in pain. She orgasms. He says it was amazing and is careful not to hurt her when he withdraws. Or: Rick’s cock is buried so deep she can’t even breathe … hegrabs her hair, yankingher head back down and forcinghis cock back into her mouth … he apologizes for coming in her mouth and says it was “uncool.”

Does that even make sense? What difference does it make that guy #1 withdraws carefully after hammering into her as she cried in pain? What difference does it make that guy #2 apologizes for coming in her mouth, when he’s already forced himself into it with such force she could hardly breathe? Such scenes require a good coat of sugar and “exquisite pleasure derived from pain,” or else they won’t sit well with female readers.

It is, once again, the usual porn routine: the reluctant woman always ends up enjoying whatever the guy is imposing on her. The whole scene still feels pretty violent to me albeit much less disturbing than the first time I read it (thanks to the nefarious effect of desensitization after repeated exposure). Some readers hated the book, but most found it hot and gave it many stars. To me, it all goes to show how colonized by male porn our whole society has become. Male porn has created demand for more extreme material. Now this romance vein of male-porn-turned-female-porn is going down the same route.

Female sexual freedom?

Sociologist Gail Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, has an interesting take on that. In the fifties women were portrayed on their knees waxing floors. Today they wax their pubic hair and are displayed on their knees to fulfill male fantasies.

Before ending this post, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the authors mentioned here. My point is to highlight how porn has pervaded mainstream romance novels. On my next post I’ll wrap up this subject with additional examples and my personal experience.

People are led to believe porn is a synonym for sex, therefore porn is healthy and stands for the right to express our sexuality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Porn is generic, poor, industrialized sex. It’s about business as usual. Yet the multibillion-dollar porn industry wants us to embrace the notion that porn and real sex are the same, and if you don’t support porn, you’re an ignorant prude.

Paraphrasing sociologist Gail Dines, if I’m not pro pornography, it doesn’t mean I’m against sex. If I tell you about the health risks of consuming fast-food, it doesn’t mean I’m against eating. Now, if the fast-food industry can shape eating behavior, if the fashion industry can shape dressing behavior, why wouldn’t porn shape sexual behavior? In the process, “we lose the most important thing that we have – our authentic sexuality, which defines us as humans, gives us connections and intimacy in a world that makes worth living in,” says Dines.

In his article “The Real Problem with Porn: It’s Bad for Sex,” journalist and sex expert Michael Castleman says: porn is the leading sex educator of men, but it teaches sex all wrong. He lists the many sex myths in porn— every man is huge and comes on cue, all women are exhibitionists, everyone is always eager, sex is 95% fellatio and intercourse, etc. etc.—and quotes Marie Silva, a pornstar married to her colleague Jack: “There’s a wonderful playfulness to our personal sex. I don’t come from intercourse, so he massages my clitoris by hand. After sex at work, it’s so nice to come home to the real thing.”

Besides not being the real thing, porn has a negative component in the very root of its name. In her lecture at the Eastern Connecticut State University, writer and speaker Maya S goes back to the origin of the word: porne refers to the lowest class of whores in Ancient Greece, regarded as human trash, and graphos means sketching. So pornography means either “drawings of filthy whores” or “women depicted as filthy whores.” In porn, women are reduced to body parts such as the vagina, breasts, anus and mouth. There’s no human connection to them, therefore there’s no accountability and they can be used for anything: their well-being, preferences and desires become irrelevant.

Nobody wants to watch a girl enjoying anal

Women are presented in positions of submission, servility or display and offered to the viewer as sexual objects that enjoy humiliation or pain, experiencing pleasure in scenes of rape, torture, pedophilia and incest. It’s all aimed at making the abuse of a woman look sexy. In her lecture, Maya shows the cover of an adult video entitled Filthy Office Sluts and also the still photo of a scene with a tied-up woman grimacing as a man holds her head back and pees into her mouth.

The pornographers’ language is very clear about how they depict women: filthy, whores, sluts, meatholes, cum-buckets that are not regular, “human” women but rather insatiable nymphomaniacs who enjoy all forms of rough sex—so it’s okay to abuse them because that’s what they want.

Take the “money shot,” for example, which is the ejaculation on the face. Maya shares an interesting insider glimpse when she gives us a quote from porn director Bill Margold: “I’d like to really show what I believe men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have.” And thus gonorrhea of the eye was born to women.

The multibillion-dollar porn industry as we know today started in the 1950s and, interestingly enough, is rooted in misogyny. In the very conservative America of that era, many men were coming back home from the war to find out that in the meantime lots of women had taken their place in the workplace to support their homes. Men were not happy with the situation, as women not only became competitors in the job market but also had retreated from their traditional housewife roles. Maya shares some ads from that era. One Van Hausen tie ad depicts a woman kneeling on the floor while serving her husband breakfast in bed. The accompanying text goes like this: “Show her it’s a man’s world.”

At 25:50, Maya presents an old porn photo of a man overpowering a woman in bed as she struggles to free herself. This is the text embedded in it: “Let’s face it, guys. Some women are just begging for rough treatment. They whine. They nag. They sass you back when you give them an order. There’s just one thing to do—give them what they deserve!” The following photo depicts a naked woman grimacing while tied-up with her genitals exposed, and this is the embedded text: “She won’t open her legs for you, will she? Now they’re open, and she can’t close them! Serves her right for all the times she teased you. Now you can do anything to her, and she can’t resist!”

Back to the 21st century, here’s how pornographer Paul Hesky addresses anal sex in porn, in a quote extracted from Robert Jensen’s book Getting Off: “Essentially, it comes from every man who’s unhappily married, and he looks at his wife who just nagged at him about this or that or whatnot, and he says, ‘I’d like to fuck you in the ass.’ He’s angry at her, right? And he can’t, so he would rather watch some girl taking it up the ass and fantasize … and that is the attraction, because when people watch anal, nobody wants to watch a girl enjoying anal.”

It’s a men’s issue

Such mentality paved the path to aberrations like the double anal penetration and the ATM routine, when the man withdraws his penis from the woman’s anus and sticks it straight into her mouth. Double anal penetration causes internal tears and, besides the pain it inflicts to her, it may contribute to rectal prolapse: it’s when the anus falls out of the body and needs to be stitched back through surgery. As for ATM, it’s responsible for fecal matter infection in her throat, not to mention the implicit message it delivers: the woman is a piece of shit and deserves to eat shit.

The documentary The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun, released in 2008, explores what happens when images of sexual degradation are used for arousal. At one point, it ties together a sequence of clips of staple practices in porn that ends with a man shoving the woman’s head in a toilet and flushing it. What drew my attention was the men’s faces, invariable contorted in rage as they pounded into the women. Seriously? Anyone really believes that’s how sex is supposed to be? In my book, the man looks at the woman with desire, closes his eyes to enjoy the sensation of their bodies connected, and then smiles. But I digress.

The last scene in the documentary shows a woman kneeling before two men. She looks up at them, gaping, and waits for them to ejaculate in her mouth. The camera freezes on her face and slowly pulls back. We see her passiveness and humiliation, we can almost feel the icy indifference in the room. Her eyes are haunting.

So if current pornography hasn’t already made it crystal clear, retracing its origins confirms that porn is about keeping women in their place and getting back at them. To sum it up, it’s about violence against women: we have several categories such as gagging bitches, facial abuse, split assholes, rape, incest, bestiality, murder and so on. One of the most popular categories, teen porn, fuels child pornography as the natural progression for men watching it.

Violence against women is a women’s issue, right? Maybe not. Maybe it’s a men’s issue since men are the perpetrators of violence for the most part. That’s the conclusion reached by violence expert and social theorist Jackson Katz in his inspiring TED Talk, in which he shows us that switching the focus to men—and how social institutions, including pornography, contribute to instilling violence in men—is key to tackle the problem. And it is not just a women’s issue for another reason: most children and men subjected to violence are victims of the violence perpetrated by men.

A piece of advice from a serial killer

When I see a feminist movement like the Slut Pride, I scratch my head. Why on earth would a self-proclaimed feminist movement take pride in perpetuating the negative connotation associated with women’s sexuality? A sexually free woman should be simply called a sexually free woman, not a slut. Or maybe we could come up with a fun name such as butterfly (suggestions, anyone?). Moreover, as much as women are entitled to wear whatever they want, I’m not so sure about how empowering it is to totally embrace the hypersexualized clothing imposed to them by the media and fashion industry—so to train them to be “porn ready,” as pornographer Joanna Angels puts it.

During a chat with author Rachel Kovach (@rskovach) on Wattpad, she offered that the word slut originally meant “dirty” and has evolved to describe a woman with many casual sex partners. She’ dirty. Slut pride? I don’t think so. The word slut shouldn’t even be considered by any “feminist” movement. There’s more: what’s the male counterpart for slut? for whore? There aren’t any because those male counterparts are proudly called studs by other men or else men whores by women.

Like many who defend pornography as sexually freeing for women and society, pornstar Belle Knox says her work is empowering and she loves it. I just checked out a couple of her first videos, Duke University Bella Knox Destroyed and Miriam Weeks Aka Bella Knox Spokane. In both, she is continuously humiliated, gagged, called “a piece of shit,” slapped and spat on the face. It’s hard to watch. I didn’t see any signs of her enjoying it, quite the opposite. Towards the end of the video she’s crying. The guy doesn’t show any concern, though: in a derisive tone, he merely asks if she always cries during sex as he keeps hammering into her. Once Belle conquered fame, she moved on to less unpleasant gigs. But other women are replacing her in those horrible videos, and the cycle continues.

Ran Gavrieli’s, in his TED Talk, tells us he stopped watching porn after realizing how much ingrained violence and anger it brought to his private fantasies—anger and violence that weren’t there originally, and that had do to with domination and submission rather than freedom. “This was not me and I decided to put an end to it.” He gives a poignant account of how pornography killed his ability to use his own imagination when having sexual fantasies. The second reason why he quit was he realized that by watching porn he increased the demand for filmed prostitution. Gavrieli is a scholar of gender studies at Tel Aviv University and made that decision while volunteering to help men and women victims of prostitution traffic. I highly recommend watching his talk.

It is well-known that porn performers often become escorts in order to survive: we hear former pornstars mentioning their side activities all the time. In the 2013 documentary mentioned in my previous post, Date My Porn Star, pornographer Dan Leal offers that “the reality of porn is these days there’s not so much work. It’s just probably 500 girls that are active and less than 50 scenes a day being shot, and it’s the same girls being shot over and over. So all the girls in porn need to have secondary revenue streams. Some of them feature ads, some of them webcam, and the vast majority escort. You’re paying for the pussy, baby.”

There are feminists producing porn with a different concept now, which attempts to have a more sex-positive and organic approach, with a collective creative process involving the performers and in some cases an educational angle. It’s an interesting idea. Just keep in mind it’s still not real sex. It’s a performance.

I’ll leave you with a statement by Ted Bundy about porn. He was a serial killer that raped and killed 30 girls and women. I don’t include it here to imply that watching porn will turn people into serial killers. But Ted Bundy’s words, in the eve of his execution in 1989, are prophetic. He makes a point in stressing that he takes full responsibility for his actions and pornography did not cause him to commit his crimes. He warns, however, to the danger of pornography contributing to mold and shape his violent behavior. Bundy says porn fuelled his urges and eroded his inhibitions to act upon them. “Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20 or 30 years ago … there are those loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms—particularly sexualized violence. What scares me is when I see what’s on cable TV. Some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today is stuff they wouldn’t show in X-rated adult theaters 30 years ago … I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography—deeply consumed by the addiction. The FBI’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornography. It’s true.”

On my last post I talked about how porn dehumanizes women and teaches men to regard them as a set of holes meant for their pleasure. Porn is fantasyland, not reality. And a dose of reality can teach a valuable lesson.

Released in 2013, the documentary Date My Porn Star shows what happens when Kevin, Jonathan and Danny, three die-hard porn fans from the UK, go to LA to visit a live set and also meet their favorite pornstars. They see the casting of three girls for an eight-hour live show produced by pornographer Dan Leal, in which the actresses will have non-stop sex with other porn fans. Kevin, Jonathan and Danny ask the girls about their personal lives. One of them is eighteen and only had sex with three boyfriends. Another candidate, a mother of three, is majoring in quantum physics—it isn’t hard to figure she was led to porn by financial pressure. The girls start to emerge as human beings, and when Kevin, Jonathan and Danny learn about the mother of three, they become clearly uncomfortable.

Once filming begins, they see how the live action wears off the girls after the second hour of uninterrupted sex with different men. In the final hours of the marathon, one of the actresses breaks down from physical and mental exhaustion but is forced to keep going because the action is streaming live. In the end of the shooting, as night descends, Dan Leal still makes the girls have sex with him and his crew. “Definitely an eye opener,” says Kevin, while Jonathan reflects that “Maybe porn is a meat grinder for young women.” Danny is disturbed: “It’s just like these people got immunity to care about other people or feelings or love. It’s weird. I can’t explain. What I saw today was absolutely disgusting and heartbreaking.”

The next day the three of them have dates with their favorite stars. As conversation flows, each talks about past romantic relationships and reflect on them. As it turns out, Jonathan may be searching for an unrealistic mate that looks like a pornstar. Kevin shows classic signs of porn addiction without being aware of it: at the age of 28, he finds real sex boring, craves variety and has been intimate with more than 60 women but hardly ever experienced an orgasm with them.

Before going back home, the three men meet up with former pornstar Vanessa Belmont. She tells them about several STDs and injuries she has suffered in her career—chlamydia, gonorrhea, anal and vaginal tears, and a bleeding throat. In her first anal scene, she had to take painkillers in order to be able to smile to the camera and say how much she loved it. When asked about her mental state on set, she says she was drained from doing such unnatural things like having group sex with several men. After their experience in LA, Kevin, Jonathan and Danny went back home with a radically different view of porn, of themselves and their own lives. They found humanity in the women involved in porn, and in the process rediscovered a part of their own humanity.

Like many in the industry, Belmont got into porn by doing nude and girl-girl scenes, and then rapidly moving to hardcore material. There’s pressure for girls to keep crossing their boundaries: directors want them to do it, they have signed a contract and need the money, and if they don’t comply they may not get another job. Judging by the various interviews I watched with pornstars, this seems to be common: the contract doesn’t specify in detail what the performers are supposed to do, and things change in the set.

The 2005 TV show The Dark Side of Porn: Diary of a Porn Virgin gives an idea of how things progress. In it, newcomer Frankie expressly tells her agent she won’t do anal sex, and in her first professional job she finds out in the set that she’s required to perform it. She refuses, and the pressure is diffused when another girl agrees to do it. However, in the end of the shooting, Frankie changes her mind and tells the director she’ll have anal intercourse next time.

Female performers are at a much higher risk than their male counterparts when it comes to STDs, and in the numerous interviews I watched, all girls mention having contracted several STDs like gonorrhea and Chlamydia, which can cause infertility. The use of condoms on set is rare, and it doesn’t offer protection against all venereal diseases anyway. Girls still working in the industry and former porn actresses alike say they would never have sex in their private lives the way they do on camera. It’s common for porn performers to take drugs or alcohol on a regular basis in order to endure physical and mental stress.

The life expectancy for a pornstar is 38 years.

In an interview in Prime Time Live, popular pornstar Belladona talks about her first gang-bang scene with twelve men, and how she couldn’t stop crying afterwards: “It was really hard because I really felt like a piece of meat. You really took a piece of me and threw it into a lion’s cage. Twelve lions. I had to do a lot of things that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do.” On another occasion, she mentions being high on dope during a scene. Former pornstar Tiffany Million says in this interview she would disconnect while filming, as if she were “a fly on the wall” just observing and feeling nothing. It was her way of coping.

So does porn stand for sexual freedom and the things women really enjoy in bed?

On my next post I’ll share with you what a very special man has to say about that. I mean, a very special man. Stay tuned!

How do pornographic images shape gender and sexual identity? Sociologist and author Gail Dines answers this question in her TED Talk “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture.”

Today people live in an image-based society and no longer in a print-based society like some decades ago. In an article published in Details magazine, entitled “How Internet porn is changing teen sex,” pornographer Joanna Angel says: “The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready.” In other words, the culture is socializing young girls to be ready for pornography whether they ever end up in a porn site or not. They have been taught to hypersexualize and pornify themselves.

When you look at the hypersexualized images surrounding us, from ads to magazine covers and music videos, they all come down to the image of a sexy, good-looking young woman. Since every image has a viewer in mind, who is the target here and what message is this kind of image sending out? The answer is simple. It targets men, and the message is: fuck me.

So, before a male growing up in this culture can even speak, he’s surrounded by images of females offering themselves to him. As for young girls, when they are developing their sexual identity, they learn they have two choices: they’re either fuckable or invisible. A girl then will most likely go for fuckable in order to fit in and feel appreciated.

The second factor in the culture that plays a big role for boys, of course, is porn itself. As society moved from print porn to online porn, everything changed. Here’s another quote from Details magazine: “There is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.” In case you don’t know, money shot is ejaculation on the face—and just for the record, it can give the woman sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea in the eye.

The Internet made pornography accessible, affordable and anonymous, the 3 As that drive demand. According to TheHuffington Post, in 2013 porn sites were already getting more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry backed up by other industries such as hospitality, IT and credit card services. Corporations traditionally not associated with porn are behind its distribution.

A study analyzing 300 porn scenes showed that 90% of the top watched scenes contained at least one aggressive act of physical and/or verbal abuse against the woman. Dines typed the word porn into a search engine to see what would come up for a boy seeking porn for the first time. Here’s what she found in a few seconds, with free access to anyone: “The major act on virtually all websites is gagging,” Dines explains. “This is when the men puts the penis so far down her throat that she gags almost to the point of vomiting. They put a lot of mascara on her face so that she’s actually tearing and you can see the rivulets of mascara running down. As she’s chocking, he grabs her hair, pulls her towards him and says, ‘Look at me.’ This is a kind of sexual psychopath. When you think that porn is a major form of sex ed, think about what’s gonna happen to the next generation of boys, most of whom are brought up on hardcore mainstream Internet porn.”

Meatholes

A 12-year old boy that seeks porn on the Internet for the first time is certainly not thinking about gagging. But the text that goes along with the images teaches him this is what he enjoys if he wants to be a man. Here’s what a popular site advocates: “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. We gag them til their makeup starts running … And then we give them the sticky bath.”

The next constant scene the boy is going to see is violent pounding anal sex. The promotional copy for the video Annally Ripped Whores, for example, goes like this: “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.” This is the violence present in regular mainstream porn, as Gail Dines points out. An introduction to sex that is disturbing and traumatizing to young boys.

A standard scene is one woman and three men performing oral, vaginal and anal penetration, pulling her hair, squeezing her neck, spitting on her face and calling her names. Women are dehumanized and become bitches, whores, sluts: insatiable objects with a set of holes whose only purpose is to pleasure males, and which men are entitled to use and abuse at will. Porn literally refers to women as “meatholes.” When men no longer see women as human beings just like themselves, all empathy is gone.

This is the sex education today across the world. Dines quotes decades of research showing that the younger boys get to porn, the more it limits their capacity for intimacy, the more it decreases their empathy for rape victims, the more it fuels depression and anxiety, and more likely they are to engage in distorted sexual behavior. Those boys will become our doctors, judges and teachers one day. Think about that.

It’s already happening in fact. In her TED Talk about rape culture, Brynne Thomas exposes what goes on in campuses. Both male and female students already reflect a rape culture in their daily language. For example, rape has become a synonym for something difficult, so they say they were ”raped” by a tough exam. And there’s more. Students at Miami University published a collection of jokes entitled How to Get Away with Rape. A chant in Yale included “No means yes, and yes means anal.“ And at Saint Mary’s, this is the chant sang by a large group of students to welcome hundreds of newcomers: “Y is for your sister, O is for oh-so-tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent…”

Don’t try this at home

We have a whole generation of boys desensitized. They need more stimulation to get aroused. Torture, rape, and sex with minors are common themes used for that end. Porn director Jules Jordan, one of the most hardcore in the world, says: “So many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something differently.” Pornographer Mitchell Spinelli explains that “People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass. It’s like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.”

Now mind you: when porn portrays violence against women, rape and pedophilia, it doesn’t matter if it’s just a “performance.” It’s still selling the notion that those acts are not only okay but exciting, pleasurable and desirable. That doesn’t mean all men are going to torture, rape and become pedophiles because they watch porn; but they get used to the idea and start to regard it as normal.

It’s not such a large stretch from thinking something is normal to acting upon it.

The brains of pornography consumers are being wired to associate sexual pleasure with causing pain to a woman. This association gets deeply ingrained in the brain because users are actively interacting with porn through masturbation and orgasm. Here’s AC Cream’s comment in an adult DVD forum with recommendations of titles centered in “painful ass fuckin”: “The most painful scene I’ve ever seen is Gang-Bang Auditions #3 from Diabolic. The scene with Aspen Brock … The guys start asking her questions like ‘You like that dick in you ass?’, but she is in such pain her answers are hard to understand. She tried to say something like ‘I looooove iiiit’, but then the tears started flowing … A porn chick not handling dick gave me major Bone-age.” In another thread, user mehlub92 says, “I am looking for clips or movies in which the pornstar in real breaks down and starts to cry, e.g. Taylor Rain in meatholes.”

This short video brings us clips of interviews with male users. They say they learn about sex through porn, they want to try out with their girlfriends the acts they see and may even force themselves on the girls. Some think porn teaches them what turns on a woman.

Let’s see what pornstar Kelly Shibari has to say about that: “If you tried porn sex at home, nobody would have an orgasm. The point of porn sex—well, most porn sex—is showing repetitive penetration in positions that never actually touch sexually pleasurable spots.”

Journalist and male sex educator Michael Castleman explains porn actresses moan in the throes of supposed passion but rarely have orgasms. “Porn is male fantasy. It has no interest in women’s sexual satisfaction. With its rushed, mechanical, nonsensual sex, it’s a rare woman who could come. No wonder so many men are in the dark about women’s orgasms and erotic satisfaction.”

On my next post, I’ll show what happens when a group of die-hard porn fans visit a real set to watch live action featuring a trio of female performers. You don’t want to miss that! Let’s find out what turns these girls on.

What happens to a generation that has porn at their fingertips through computers and smartphones?

Just by typing the word porn into a search engine, they get 436 million results in a matter of seconds. In the 2014 BBC show Porn: What’s the Harm? presenter Jameela Jamil leads us through the biggest survey ever conducted on pornography use in the UK, with over a thousand teenagers from the ages 16 to 21 anonymously answering questions such as: How old were you when you first watched porn? How often do you watch it now? How do you think it affects what men and women expect from sex?

The answers were analyzed by leading experts in pornography Dr. Miranda Horvart and Dr. Maddy Coy. The average age for boys to watch porn for the first time is 10. Of all teenagers surveyed, only 22% saw porn for the first time on purpose; the rest was shown porn by someone else. And amid the bombarding of pornographic images in their daily lives, 24% of the teenagers said they encountered pornographic material at least once a week when they were looking for something else. Most men and women used it for sexual stimulation and masturbation.

From the entire group, 10% responded they thought that while men watch porn for sexual gratification, women watch it to learn about sex. I myself—judging by what I found in my own research—think many males also use porn to learn about sex. I remember a few mentioning they would watch girl-girl porn to that end, and they also believed porn sex was what girls liked.

In general, 30% of the boys deliberately looked for porn against 12% of the girls, and 50% of the boys looked for porn from once a day to once a week, whereas 50% of the girls never looked for porn online. Out of a thousand teenagers, 229 persons said there was nothing good about porn—75% of those were females.

How porn affects sexual expectations

Former pornstar Gemma Massey tells Jamila many girls in the industry take drugs to endure the sex scenes, and they only do such scenes because they need the money. I also heard that from countless ex-porn stars. And, like all of them, Gemma says: “Porn sex is not real. It’s not how I would have sex at home at all.” She adds that doing porn all the time mentally messes up with the person. I will discuss that in a future post.

When asked “Do you think porn affects what young people expect from sex?” 75% of the survey group said yes to males’ expectations, and 53% said yes to females’ expectations. One out of 3 top responses was that boys expected girls’ bodies to be like those of pornstars, with no pubic hair and large breasts. I would add that porn also taught boys their own penises need to be huge and deliver long, sustained erections—which naturally causes great anxiety to them. As for girls, porn has led a large number of young women to seek cosmetic surgery for vaginal lip reduction: girls as young as 12 are considering this kind of surgery.

This goes to show how porn imposes limited views of women’s bodies. A group of boys and girls participating in the survey were shown a panel with 57 molds taken from real women’s vulvas, which naturally varied in shape and size. Both boys and girls were surprised to learn those vulvas were normal: all of them thought the vulvas were abnormal or ugly. As for me, I was saddened by the fact that girls today can’t accept the very symbol of their womanhood. It’s not enough that they need to compete with photoshoped models 25% thinner than a regular woman (in old times, the rate would be only 8%), now they also learn to reject their genitals. Gynecologist Gail Busby, who conducted the experiment, discourages young girls to do the surgery: “They don’t need surgery because there’s nothing wrong with them.”

The most common answer to how porn affected teenagers’ expectations about sex was that young men expected women to behave like sex objects, and young women expected to be treated like sex objects. A 17-year old boy responded: “Guys will expect the chance for rougher sex, or for a girl to be very flexible and so on.” A 16-year old girl said: “Boys think all girls will behave like girls in porn and that a lot of quite extreme stuff is normal to do.”

In addition, the behavior of girls sexting their naked pictures has become a natural progression in a hypersexualized society that regards females as sex objects, and in which females regard themselves as sexual objects. Here, we go back to my post about the hypersexualization of children: girls send those pictures because they believe it’s what’s expected from them in order to fit in and avoid rejection.

When those sexy images leak— and they often do—it doesn’t end well. Sometimes it can even lead to suicide, like in the case of 18-year old Jessica Logan and 13-year old Hope Witsell. The lives of girls are ruined when those pictures are shared and become viral, and there are cases in which such images are downloaded and transferred to child pornography sites (on those sites, according to the UK Internet Watch Foundation, there are photos of victims as young as 3 to 6 years old, which were taken by older children). When images leak, female victims face social isolation and bullying. As much as modern society likes to deem itself progressive, double standards are stronger than ever when it comes to sexuality.

There’s more to porn

If there are clear consequences for young people when it comes to sexting and posting sexual images, the effects of childhood exposure to porn are harder to gage. In 2014, a 12-year old boy raped his 7-year old sister after watching hardcore porn online: he said he watched it with friends and gained a desire to try it out. Sociologist Gail Dines, author of the book Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, interviewed a man incarcerated for child molestation: he told Dines he wasn’t a pedophile and just wanted to try something different. His is not an isolated case. For the first time, men who aren’t inherently pedophiles are initiating sex with children.

In the BBC program, Jamil interviewed a girl in her early twenties who was raped by someone she thought of as a friend. When she went to his blog afterwards, she found out it included porn images that were very similar to what had happened to her. She adds: “For certain people who do that, rape is so ingrained in their minds that for them it’s okay.”

Lynnette Smith, a sex educator working with teenagers on a daily basis for the past 20 years, is concerned about what she’s been hearing from teenage boys. In several schools, quite often, they ask her: “If I’m being intimate or trying it on with a girl and she doesn’t like it, if I keep going and keep going, she will finally like it, won’t she?” Invariably, Smith ends up tracking the boys’ question back to porn they had watched.

There you go.

So far I’ve covered what porn does physically and mentally to boys and what stems from the interaction of boys and girls with pornographic images. On my next post, I’ll focus on females and porn.

In the meantime, you can watch Porn: What’s the Harm? for additional information and also to learn more about what the surveyed teenagers said. It’s a fascinating program.

What about you? What’s your take on porn, and how do you think it affects your own behavior or the behavior of those around you?

Can porn physically change the structure of your brain and even shrink it?

Hold on. We’ll get to that in a while.

With the wide spread use of high-speed Internet porn, we are in the middle of the fastest moving unconscious experiment ever conducted on a global level: nearly every young guy with Internet access becomes an eager test subject. That’s the conclusion of several experts, including physiology teacher Gary Wilson, who presented a TED Talk on the subject.

It all starts with a 10-year old boy—that’s the age when, according to research, boys usually seek pornography for the first time. High-speed Internet offers him not only nudity but constant novelty at a click of the mouse.

Our boy gets hooked.

The primal portion of his brain, focused on basic survival and reproduction, sees every new female on-screen as an opportunity for matting. It then releases dopamine, which keeps the boy clicking and clicking for more gratification—pretty much like a rat in a lab. A heavy porn user’s brain begins associating sex with behaviors such as being alone, voyeurism, clicking and searching, multiple tabs, constant novelty, shock and surprise.

Real sex, in contrast, is courtship, touching and being touched, smells, pheromones, emotional connection and interaction with a person. So what happens when this porn user finds a real mate?

He realizes he’s in trouble.

The increase of dopamine production promotes a cycle of binging and craving that numbs the brain to pleasures of everyday life while making it hyper-reactive to porn. Finally, the user’s willpower erodes, his brain changes and porn addiction settles. Symptoms include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Erectile dysfunction

It’s hard to believe that something healthy as sex can be harmful, but as Wilson notes, “Internet porn is not sex: it’s as different from real sex as today’s videogames are from checkers. From all activities on the Internet, porn is the most addictive.”

According to sexual addiction expert Dr. Victor Cline, repeated exposure to porn accompanied by masturbation triggers the first phase of the addiction. The second phase is escalation, requiring more porn exposure to achieve the same buzz and sometimes leading to a preference for porn over sexual intercourse. The third phase is desensitization, when the user views as normal what was once considered repulsive or immoral.

Finally, in the acting-out phase, the addict runs an increased risk of making the leap from screen to real life. This behavior may manifest itself in the form of promiscuity, cheating a partner, voyeurism, exhibitionism, group sex, rape, sadomasochism, or even child molestation.

Another serious problem with porn addiction is erectile dysfunction—which no blue pill can cure. A survey shows that Internet porn is killing young men’s performance: tuned into the porn hypergratification that’s provided by constant novelty, shock and surprise, the men’s brains are sending weaker signals to their genitals during real-life sex. The libido drops to the point that an erection becomes impossible, even while watching porn.

Like in a classical case of addiction, there is an increasing desensitization of the brain. It will then try to compensate that by seeking more novelty, shock and surprise, until it’s overstimulated to the limit and can no longer respond. The teenage brain is extremely vulnerable to addiction because its reward system is fully developed, whereas its restriction system is not: a teenage brain is all accelerator and no brakes.

Until a few years ago, there was no way of studying the impact of porn in human behavior because it was impossible to form a control group of non-users. That spoke volumes about the pervasiveness of pornography among men. When porn addicts began to seek help and break their habit, they became the control group that was missing.

From pigs to dogs to fish

Journalist Martin Daubney investigates the effects of porn in young users in the 2013 documentary Porn on the Brain. He used to be the editor of porn magazine Loaded and, after a long period away from pornography, he goes online and searches for the keyword porn. The results pop up in seconds. He’s shocked: “The first thing I see is two gaping orifices … It’s actually an Asian girl’s posterior, called Asian Slut Double Dipped.” He then finds a woman being fisted by one man while another pisses on her face. Next, a staged incest depicts the fisting of a teenager by her dad.

“I don’t remember being exposed to anything like this ever in my life,” says Daubney. “Porn has become altogether macabre. Where is the enjoyment and innocence gone? Now it’s all about a world of male domination and female humiliation.” A group of high school students tells him porn content pops up all the time on their Facebook or in advertisements, including illegal material—there’s everything “from pigs to dogs to fish.”

Daubney persuades neuroscientist Dr. Valeri Voon, from the University of Cambridge, to perform a brain scan in a group of porn addicts while they watch pornographic images. Unsure of what to expect, she is surprised with the results: users’ brains reacted just like the brains of substance addicts, with a pronounced increase in activity in the reward center.

A perfect example of the effects of porn addiction is provided by Calum, a good-looking 19-year old student who watches porn at least 15 times a day. He volunteers to talk on camera and picks up Daubney to show him around while they chat. As Calum is driving, he sees a girl on the street that triggers his compulsion. He’s forced to rush to a public restroom and, afterwards, looks miserable. He has no control over his porn addiction.

In the past Calum tried to cut off his habit, but porn images still invaded his fantasies. When Calum describes his real-life sex experiences, it’s obvious he’s been heavily conditioned by porn to regard women as sexual objects existing solely to please him, as he mentions twice that his preferences in bed depend on “what the girl has to offer.” His great concern regarding his addiction is that he’s not getting the most of sex as a result. That alone goes to show he seems to have lost the ability to connect with a partner: he has sex with body parts. “If a girl has a nice ass it has to be anal. If she has nice breasts it has to be missionary.” To Calum, real sex is not as good as porn. Luckily he didn’t become a sex offender.

Dr. John Woods, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, has treated dozens of young sex offenders. In the early 2000s there were very few cases of online porn involved in an offender’s behavior. “Now they’re the majority. There is no direct proof that watching violent porn instigates violent acts towards women,” he explains, “but clinically it’s clear that there is a connection.” Woods mentions the case of a patient who watched extreme porn and, haunted by those images, eventually raped a child.

Finally an erection

In the 2008 documentary Porndemic: Sex in the Digital Age by Robin Benger, addiction therapist Dr. Doris Vincent states that until 2002 she had never treated sex addicts. Six years later, she had more than 200 patients suffering from porn addiction, all male. “Internet porn is the crack and cocaine of sex addiction. It affects your dopamine reward system quite strongly. You’re playing around with very dangerous chemicals in your brain.”

Two physical changes occur in the brains of porn users, as shown in a study conducted in Germany in 2014. The first change is a rewiring of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that restricts overindulging behavior. The second and more stunning neurological discovery is that high-speed Internet porn may actually shrink the brain: the more a person watches porn, the more accentuated the shrinkage. That means less grey matter in the portion of the brain responsible for decision making and motivation.

The good news is the addiction symptoms are reversed when the user quits watching porn, and after a few months of abstinence the changes are astounding. Interestingly enough, middle-age men recover faster than teenagers because their brains had not been impacted by Internet porn until later in their lives. Former users report the ability to have an erection, more self-confidence, focus and proactivity.

Men willing to quit porn now join an expanding movement across the Internet, with thousands of new adepts on sites like NoFap and Reboot Nation. And the numbers keep rising. Reboot Nation’s founder Gabe Deen tells his story in the 2015 news special Is free pornography destroying our brains?He began watching porn on a regular basis when he was eight. At one point Deen couldn’t lead a normal life without porn. He developed erectile dysfunction at the age of 23.

“It started out with very soft porn, then it would escalate to a couple of guys and one girl, gang bangs … and then I would watch things that were shocking or created anxiety, like very abusive and misogynistic stuff.” Neurosurgeon Donald Hilton, interviewed in the program, explains that, since the human brain naturally seeks novelty, there’s a progression in the use of porn that may translate into violence and pedophilia: “We need new. Then new is aggression. New is younger.”

Neuroscience studies still need to be expanded for a definitive conclusion about how porn affects the brain, but it certainly facilitates the desensitization to violence and shapes behavior.

Not only porn addicts are affected by pornography, though. Boys and girls, men and women that aren’t addicted can also be dramatically impacted by porn. I’ll be exploring that on my next post.